New Customer

Just signed up, and there is alot to like about this host. I really like how you exposed pretty much everything for remote administration, and how you keep on top of the latest and greatest of asp.net technology.

My one (big) complaint so far is the lack of real URL rewriting for subdomains. I have a few big customers, and a whole bunch of small customers. When I saw you had an unlimited subdomains addon, I figured my big customers could each get their own account, but for smaller ones I could do 3 per account. This isn't really possible without one of the more robust mod_rewrite ISAPI modules installed and configured on IIS.

 

I am familiar with it, and it is great for the path elements after the domain, and with as explicit a ruleset as possible. What i am talking about is something like mod_rewrite on apache, or http://www.micronovae.com/ModRewrite/ModRewrite.html for IIS.

If you want to see what I mean, this is a site I use for my php stuff www.bluehost.com/dm/main_cp.html?domain=blewhost.com&ldomain=blewhost.com&lpass=demo123 (demo cpanel for bluehost.com). Scroll about half way down the page for the domain section, and click on subdomains. You will see there, you can define a subdomain and where it will point to. When you do that, it actually does a server side masked redirect, so the URL bar stays the same. Now, what you do is go back to the main cpanel, and click on 'addon domain'. From there, you can tell it to map additional domains to specific folders, which again, is all handled server side.

With this functionality (and some good security measures with schemas and multiple db logins), you can easily host multiple clients on one account. I realise this isn't the easiest thing in the world to do with IIS, but it would make your service a hell of alot more attractive to a whole class of users.

seekdotnet.com offers this, webhostforasp.net offers this, sleekhost.com (i think) offers this.

All of those are in a class well below you guys, and I would rather have 3-4 accounts with you, then just use you for my big clients who want their own hosting, and move my small clients over somewhere else.

 

That definitely looks like a PHP'ers dream host but I'd be with a ton of other ASP.NET guys across the table.
btw, have you looked at the new features on the Windows Server 2008 servers?
http://learn.iis.net/
Salute,
Mark

 

Yeah, im not bashing the MS side of things or anything. C# is one of my favorite languages, and Perl/PHP makes me puke a bit in my mouth whenever I have to work with it. And honestly, it is 2008, who wants to be digging through thousands of lines of config files anymore? But there are some sites I have inherited or maintain that use PHP, so I keep them all on bluehost.

What I am pointing out is that bluehost has functionality that makes someone in my position a very happy camper, and it is all that it would take for DASP to be the perfect host for me.

 

To be honest, you are stating your tastes in a more friendly manner than most.
I'm used to this sort of thing turning into an all out battle.

Yes DASP is an awesome host and suggesting things that can improve their market is sweet indeed.
All the best,
Mark

PS - I'm 46, have been coding since the mid 80's andreally enjoy these chats.

 

ISAPI filter are definately a pain, and back in the .net 1.0 days they were not all that robust. I know quite a few people nowadays who are using them in production envrionments though, and honestly, I think it is something you guys should take another look at.

Like I said before, ASP rewriting is not really a good solution for this problem. It only works well with very specific rulesets ('Products?id=1242' -> 'Products/1242'). What would make me over the moon happy is if I could get the same functionality here as I do in bluehost. Again, like I said before, if you did, you would be alot more attractive to a whole class of users.

It would be great if IIS included this functionality, but AFAIK 7.0 does not.